Brake Lights
When the police finally caught up with Hodges Berkley, he was still shooting at traffic lights. It was midnight, and eyewitness accounts differed somewhat on the subject of his appearance. Some said he had a slick, greenish look, as if draped in the skin of a dead alien. Others described thick, serpentine black wires running from the small of his back to his gun hand. A nineteen-year-old heroin addict from the Houston suburbs described him as “naked and shiny.” Photos from his eventual arrest would show a smirking man in a thigh-length brown coat, sporting purple hair and oversized aviator goggles heavily tinted by an unidentified compound.
What the witness could agree on was that he was a preternaturally good shot. The stoplight would ding over to a new color and, a microsecond later, be annihilated by a bullet. When the officers arrived on scene, Berkley’s reaction was to turn and open fire on the squad cars. He had taken out three headlights and five sirens by the time the cops returned fire. What they didn’t realize was that Berkley was apparently generating some kind of magnofield using cannibalized radio parts and an old refrigerator motor. Bullets drifting in his magnetic eddies like a halo of lackadaisical bees, he strode forward, blowing glittering holes in various light sources.
“They’re here,” he said calmly.
“Drop your weapon!” screamed the scene commander.
Berkley seemed legitimately startled. He glanced at the noise, then distractedly pointed his gun at the officer. Several more magazines were emptied into his defensive field.
“I’m not going to shoot you, idiot.” Berkley waved his weapon theatrically. “HehehehumeheheHahHAHAHAhe,” he laughed. “Fuck it, I surrender!” He dropped his gun and put both hands above his head. Several officers moved hesitantly forward. Berkley had killed most light producers in the immediate area, and he was being illuminated by a half-dozen shaky flashlights.
“They’re going to kill you all,” he said.
“. . . alien force . . . pocket galaxy . . .” said Berkley.
“. . .allergic to light?” Officer Barlow asked, half-mockingly.
“. . . sophisticated weapons technology . . . you’re going . . . hide in the dark?” asked Officer Quintam.
“Morons . . . not so they can’t see you. It’s so you can’t see them.”
The trailing car described what happened next as a liquid explosion, and by the time the other on-site officers corralled the out-of-control vehicle, everyone inside was inexplicably dead.
Eventually, a post-mortem tox screening revealed that Berkley was very much on drugs. He was also right. There was a neuro-virus loose on Earth that piggybacked on photons right into the central nervous system. Six months later, to much ceremony, xenobiologists revealed that they had identified the plague as a light-borne brain parasite that had the virulence necessary to quickly infect the entire planet.
Of course, it would have been nice if they’d figured that out before everyone’s eyeballs melted.